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Land of the Multi-No-Longer Family House

The flanks of Cobble Hill Park typify the area: small row houses on Verandah Place, near left, and town houses along Congress Street. Town houses are so coveted that some new arrivals retrofit multifamilies.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

EVEN within the rarefied region of brownstone Brooklyn, where landmark protections abound and residents speak of vintage cornices in the same knowing manner they discuss artisanal cheeses, the low-rise streetscape of Cobble Hill is distinctive for its consistently intimate 19th-century feel.

At the neighborhood’s heart, the serene green wedge of Cobble Hill Park is flanked on the north by period town houses and on the south by one of the sweetest ensembles in New York, a row of two-and-a-half- and three-story brick dwellings that seem scarcely larger than dollhouses.

On the secluded block of Warren Place, two rows of 11-foot-wide brick homes, built in 1879 as affordable housing, face each other across a garden with a splashing iron fountain. On Kane Street, a picturesquely battered pulley is suspended above the hayloft door of a restored carriage house.

Like Brooklyn Heights, its more storied neighbor to the north, Cobble Hill is one of the borough’s oldest neighborhoods, and most of its blocks lie within a historic district. Yet it has few high-rises and little of the workday crush one encounters on commercial blocks north of Atlantic Avenue.

“I get calls all the time from people asking me if the old neighborhood still looks the same,” said Roy Sloane, the president of the Cobble Hill Association, who has lived on Pacific Street since the 1970s, “and I say: ‘It looks more the same. It’s getting more intact, not less intact.’ ” As an example, Mr. Sloane cited three nearby town houses, long ago refaced with simulated masonry, whose original stoops were lopped off.

“Now,” he said, “two of them have had new owners come in who chipped off the PermaStone and either returned it to brick or did a really nice new brownstone job, and they’ve returned the stoops.”

A short subway ride from Wall Street and occupying some 21 blocks, Cobble Hill has in recent years sustained an influx of buyers from Manhattan. The holy grail for these new arrivals, brokers say, is the neighborhood’s archetypal structure: the 19th-century single-family town house, which often costs upward of $3 million. But since few such houses come on the market, buyers have taken to acquiring and reconfiguring multifamily brownstones.

“These were built originally as one-family houses,” said Gigi Zimmerman, the sales director of Brownstone Real Estate, “and after having spent generations as two-, three- and four-family houses, we’re now seeing them converted back. We’re seeing people buying multifamilies for their own use and converting them, and we’re seeing people buying multifamilies to convert back into one-families and flipping them.”

For Julia and John Mack, an interior designer and an architect, transforming a subdivided town house offered the opportunity to push one another creatively. “It’s good for our design, and good for our marriage,” Ms. Mack said.

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Credit
The New York Times

Last year, after a decade living in a town house on Baltic Street with their two children, the couple paid $1.965 million for a high-stooped four-family brownstone on Strong Place.

“The house was not love at first sight,” Ms. Mack said, citing the “pink whirlpool bathtub on the parlor floor.” But the place had “good bones,” and they had a vision for it.

Because the house is only a touch over 17 feet wide, the couple gave it a sense of volume and light by reinforcing the parlor-floor ceiling with steel and removing the wall that separated the room from the stair hall.

“It gives you a view of both the front and back windows,” she said, “and we continued that concept on the two floors above. I feel it’s really breathing fresh air into these houses to redo them in a contemporary way; it takes the ‘stodgy’ out of living in an old house.”

The Cobble Hill Association, a civic group founded in 1958, defines the neighborhood’s borders as essentially identical to those of its historic district: Atlantic Avenue on the north, Degraw Street on the south, Hicks Street on the west, and Court Street on the east. Some argue that Smith Street rather than Court marks the dividing line between Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill.

In 2010, 78 percent of the area’s 7,162 residents were white, 9 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black and 6 percent Asian, according to data provided by Susan Weber-Stoger, a Queens College demographer. From 2000 to 2010, the median value of owner-occupied housing units rose by a third, to top $1 million.

Although architecturally cohesive, Cobble Hill is far from homogeneous. Interspersed with the brownstones are various beguiling 19th-century structures, like Victorian schoolhouses and Gothic Revival churches, some of them condominiums or co-ops.

One of the more unusual complexes is Cobble Hill Towers, a recently converted condo comprising nine six-story red-brick buildings along Warren and Baltic Streets and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Built in the 1870s to provide “improved dwellings for the laboring classes,” the Dickensian-looking walk-ups have airy units, exterior bluestone staircases and handsome ironwork.

One new resident is Caroline Sinders, a photographer and graduate student, who fell in love with Cobble Hill while strolling its leafy streets during trips to a music theater in nearby Red Hook. “I had no idea this magical land existed,” she said, noting how the neighborhood’s palpable sense of history reminded her of New Orleans, her hometown.

“Years ago I was walking around and I took a picture of the sign at Cobble Hill Towers and said, ‘One day I’m going to live there,’ ” she recalled. In August her prediction came true. With help from her parents, Ms. Sinders paid $462,500 for an 800-square-foot two-bedroom condo, which she shares with a roommate. Their living room faces a former church, also a condo, while her bedroom overlooks her complex’s grassy courtyard and wisteria-covered gazebo.

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“We have these beautiful fire escapes,” she said, adding that “the cat and I” have just enough lounging room. “I love sitting out there because there are always children playing.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Inventory is low, which brokers say has been pushing up prices. Rod Murray, a senior vice president of Halstead Property in Cobble Hill, said a search of the Real Estate Board of New York database showed only seven town house sales in Cobble Hill this year. Single-family homes ranged from $2.6 million, for a 15-foot-wide house, to $4.375 million for a 25-foot-wide building, he said; the range for multifamily homes was $2.5 million to $2.95 million.

Condos typically range from $650 to $850 per square foot, according to Ms. Zimmerman. An exception, she said, is the Landmark at Strong Place, a converted church, where condos have sold for close to $1,000 a square foot. Units in Cobble Hill Towers, 35 percent of them sold, are commanding $500 to $600 per square foot, according to David Kramer, a principal of the Hudson Companies, the condominium’s developer.

Co-ops are selling from $850 to $950 per square foot, Mr. Murray said. A search on Streeteasy.com found 47 places for sale, 6 of them town houses. Mr. Murray estimates that sales this year have taken 30 to 60 days; last year they took 60 to 90. Two-bedrooms in wide brownstones rent for $3,500 to $4,000 a month, he said.

WHAT TO DO

The area has such a variety of spots to eat, drink, shop and photograph that Ms. Sinders sometimes doesn’t venture elsewhere for days. When she needs material for her design and fashion blog, Cellar Paper, she grabs her camera and heads to Cafe Pedlar on Court Street, where “there are a lot of fashionable young ladies wearing really interesting outfits.”

Although elegant arrivals like the Chocolate Room have invigorated Court Street, the strip retains its small-town aura, with family-owned stalwarts like Jim and Andy’s market, a sliver of a shop where produce is still weighed on hanging Detecto scales.

Smith Street’s restaurant row, with boutiques like Bird, offers an eclectic nightlife. The Pier 6 playground, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, has filled a need, although broken swings and a damaged surface have become an issue.

THE SCHOOLS

Public School 29 on Henry Street serves kindergarten through fifth grade and received a C on its most recent city progress report. The Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies, in Carroll Gardens, teaches Grades 6 through 12. It earned an A on its reports; SAT averages in 2011 were 371 in reading, 362 in math, and 369 in writing, versus 436, 460 and 431 citywide.

Nearby private schools include two in Brooklyn Heights, Packer Collegiate and Saint Ann’s, where the 2012 SAT medians were 730, 700 and 730.

THE COMMUTE

Lower Manhattan is three stops on the F train from the Bergen Street subway station on Smith Street; the ride to Midtown takes about 25 minutes. The Borough Hall-Court Street station in Brooklyn Heights, a short walk from northern Cobble Hill, is served by the 2, 3, 4, 5 and R trains.

THE HISTORY

During the Revolution, the British lopped off the top of “Cobleshill,” a conical hill near the current intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, so that it would not have a vantage point on their Brooklyn Heights headquarters, according to the landmarks panel.

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2012, on page RE7 of the New York edition with the headline: Land of the Multi-No-Longer Family House. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe